Outsourcing may be understood to describe a situation where a client organization imposes a specific set of tasks upon a third party. The third party may be a separate or an auxiliary organization. The third party may be located in an another country or a location near the client organization. One example of outsourcing is a third party providing information technology services for an automobile and/or a machine tools manufacturer. These information technology services might range from supply chain management to the control of manufacturing processes. Some of these information technology services might be performed in one country whereas other information technology services may be performed in a different country.
An outsourcing environment may be understood to include objects, processes, and circumstances defining how the third party performs tasks for the client organization. The elaboration of the outsourcing environment may include information system configuration requirements, access control requirements or restriction enclosed for the sake of security. The objects in the outsourcing environment may include equipment, such as computers configured according to the configuration requirements. It may be desirable for the client organization to define a part of an outsourcing environment for the third party in order to mitigate risk and maintain accountability within the client organization. Thus, the third party may be required to operate under restrictions outside its control.
One or more technical restrictions may be imposed on the users, user computers, and/or server computers in an outsourcing environment. It may be desirable to constrain the communication of computers in an outsourcing environment to one local area network LAN, or to limit the communications of computers in an outsourcing environment to an explicitly defined set of computers. Network connectivity in an outsourcing environment may be limited to users and computers directed to perform specific tasks. It may also be desirable to restrict user access to computers and/or to restrict the interactions between computers.
The outsourcing environment may limit communications and/or the exchange of data between computers. In particular, the outsourcing environment may limit the open TCP/IP ports and/or the services which may be enabled or run on user computers. In addition, it may not be possible to operate a web server or configure a computer system to accept connections conforming to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP or HTTPS), in the outsourcing environment. Also, it may not be possible to operate a database server in the outsourcing environment; in particular, it may not be possible to configure a computer to accept connections conforming to database protocols such as Transparent Network Substrate (Oracle), SQL*Net (Oracle), Tabular Data Stream (Microsoft), or similar protocols (Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation; Oracle is a trademark of Oracle Corporation). Furthermore, it may not be possible to make changes to the system registry on a user computer in the outsourcing environment. Moreover, direct access to the Internet may not be allowed in the outsourcing environment.
One or more of the terms in this application may be a trademark of a corresponding owner.